Spectrum
by The Black Sun's Daughter
Summary: Everyone had a colour. It was like an invisible halo of colour surrounding a person, bleeding out of their skin. He could see it when nobody else could, and that colour told him more about a person than anything else.
1. Seeing the Spectrum

Connor Temple was a superhero. Maybe not in the terms of having x-ray vision, super strength, or flight. No, he wasn't anything like that, not one to be found in the comic books. His superpower was all his own. He didn't realise that normal people didn't experience things the way he did until he was seven years old. Until then, he'd always thought that everyone saw the halo of colours around other people, that everyone could taste things doing math and heard machines singing when they ran, that it was nothing extraordinary, nothing uncommon. It wasn't until he was seven and refused to go to class in primary that he realised just how uncommon he was. He had refused to go to class because his maths teacher was, as he'd stubbornly insisted, "too grey." He couldn't stand to hear it. It'd drive him crackers, and then he'd end up having strange little fits.

His mum had taken him to see a doctor after the headmistress called home out of concern. After a series of irritating tests that'd pushed the limits of his childish patience, the doctor was able to put a name to his condition—synaesthesia. The official diagnosis of it consisted of a lot of big long words he didn't like to hear because they were far too grey, but Mum had explained it to him much better: part of his brain was cross-wired. He was a synesthete. His senses were linked up to each other in ways nobody else experienced.

When he did science, he could hear music, specific pieces of music. Chemistry was Bach, but biology was Mozart. Doing maths, however, that made him taste things, usually breakfast, like eggs and toast and hashbrowns and orange juice. And technology sang to him. Some machines, like cars and planes and ships and even guns, they became a little more than machines, gained personality of their own. He could hear their song, the heavy clatter of gears clanking, the high counterpoint of electricity through wires, the percussion of pumps working, all of it mingling together in a song that was all their own. He had an eidetic memory, sometimes mistakenly called a photographic memory. He remembered things with clarity, but not as a fresco, merely images painted on the wall, but also with sound and texture and smell. It was important to him. People thought it was weird, but it was instinctive and habitual of him to sniff something new, even taste it, provided that it wasn't another person or something gross. But it also came with a whole new problem—sensory overload. If he became overwhelmed, if there was too much, then he would get twitchy, or he couldn't stand to be touched, or he would just shut down entirely, withdrawing into himself. He refused to go to a psychiatrist—he wasn't crazy—but his mum was a better therapist than any shrink.

That wasn't the only thing, though. There were the colours, too.

Everyone had a colour. It was like an invisible halo of colour surrounding a person, bleeding out of their skin. He could see it when nobody else could, and that colour told him more about a person than anything else. He knew that seeing the colours wasn't really synaesthesia, that it really was a peculiarity unique to him and him alone, so he always kept it to himself. Nobody was ever just one colour. There were others, ones that came and went and changed with moods and thoughts, but there was always one base colour, one that dominated. Connor would call it an aura, if he believed in that sort of thing. It was really the only term that properly described it.

People had the strangest ideas about colour. They didn't seem to understand that there was no such thing as _just_ when it came to colour. There was no such thing as _just_ a colour. Like red. There was no such thing as _just_ red. There was cherry, crimson, fresh blood, scarlet, burgundy, ruby, cerise, salmon, garnet, claret, dragon's blood, maroon, watermelon, cranberry, rose, the list went on and on. Just like _red_ , there was no such thing as _blue._ There was no such thing as _just blue._ Connor found that he hated the words 'blue' and 'red', hated how they were so…plain. There was cerulean, azure, cornflower, sapphire, cobalt, navy, indigo, Prussian, peacock, steel, ice, lapis lazuli, but there was no _just blue._

By the time he went to college at Central Metropolitan University with full scholarship, Connor was able to control all of his unusual senses, able to filter so he wasn't constantly overwhelmed. He never told anyone about it. He kept it his own little secret and allowed people to think that he was some kind of freak whenever he hummed along with the songs of machines or absently noted he tasted eggs and toast during algebra class. Not even Tom and Duncan ever knew. He didn't know why he didn't like telling people. Maybe it was because, when he was seven, he liked to think that he was some kind of superhero with his own special powers, and he had to keep them secret from the rest of the world so his archenemy didn't discover his true identity.

Not even when he became part of the anomaly project with Abby and Stephen and Cutter did he reveal his synaesthesia. Just like everyone else, they thought he was odd, and he let them think that. It didn't matter how they saw him because he knew what he really was. Connor Temple was a superhero with his own super-senses.


	2. Prussian Blue

Stephen James Hart is the most blue person that Connor has ever seen.

Most people have streaks of blue, perhaps some larger patches or bright flecks, but not Stephen. His entire base colour is blue, a lovely deep, strong Prussian blue, chased with sparks of silver, cool and calm and unruffled. His colours always hold close to him, drawing near to his skin like a cloak. They don't bleed outward to mingle with other people's, merely cling close to his skin. Usually there's curls and trickles of other colours, butter yellow and Kelly green and salmon pink, but they are always hidden deep in the blue, like Stephen's ashamed to show any sort of emotion in front of other people.

And whenever he's around Cutter, well, then his colours get _really_ weird. Connor doesn't notice it at first, simply because he isn't looking. Whenever he's around the professor, down in the depths of all that deep Prussian blue, there's a part of him that wrinkles and darkens to shades of burnt sienna and sour yellow and crystalline claret. It's all the signs that he's keeping some secret, something dark and hurtful to both of them, and it hurts him to keep it to himself yet cannot stand to let it show. It isn't until later that Connor realises that all those muddled, jagged colours are the secret of Helen and their affair.

After that, the sienna, claret, and bitter yellow don't appear, but they are replaced by something more painful. Crimson is a colour of pain. Connor knows that, he's seen it before. People that have been seriously hurt, physical or emotional, their colours are swarmed by terrible washes of crimson. And whenever Cutter or Abby or whoever gives him that hateful look, the one they've been giving him since they found out about the affair, Stephen acts like it doesn't matter, seems to let it just roll off his back, and only Connor can see the proof otherwise, the gouges of crimson that are ripped into the tracker's cool blue like the lashes of a whip. The bright silver sparks that always chase through the Prussian blue like stars grow dull and morose, flecks of grey, and his colours draw even closer to him, like they're trying to protect him. The bright, happy colours don't appear but for once in a blue moon, it seems. The Prussian blue is no longer cool and unruffled, but rather streaky and mottled, turning darker with his misery, regret, and self-loathing.

Connor aches to see it.


	3. Ruby Red

All colours have more than one meaning to them. Crimson is pain, but scarlet is anger. Every nuance of shade has a different purpose, a different message. Connor knows more about the difference in colours than probably anyone else in the world.

And ruby is definitely not so good. Brighter than crimson, darker than scarlet. Ruby is the colour of hatred, of unhindered spite, but sometimes it is also the colour of lust. Not love, which is a soft, warm garnet, but lust, a raw hunger that borders on cruelty at times. Like the gem it is named for, it is hard and sharp and crystalline, never soft, never gentle, and Helen is the most ruby person he'd ever met, to the extent of their being nearly no other colour in her at all, just an endless, dangerously glinting ruby, like she's bathed in frozen fire. When Connor first sees her, there's this thick matte of murky grey-brown over her colours, pulled in close to her skin, which means she is trying hard to hide herself, to appear like something she isn't, but the ruby is still there, close to her skin, hissing and spitting under the grey. It makes her look as though she's on fire, and it terrifies him. It's only worse when she drops the oh-so-helpful act and shrugs off the dark colours like a snake shedding its skin. Then she's wreathed in her own crystalline hell, edged in oily black.

Whenever she meets up with Stephen, the ruby burns brighter, sharp, bladed fingers creeping out to dig into his colours, trying to drag him to her even as he struggles to get away. Even now, there is a scar in Stephen's colours, a gash of ruby in his Prussian blue like a battle scar, a wound that doesn't heal. Connor does his best to stay as far away from her as possible, afraid of that jagged-edged ruby, afraid of the oily black that oozes and crawls through the cracks, because he knows that black is the colour of madness, of insanity and death, and he's afraid that if it touches him, the stain will never come out.

Even more baffling, though, is when Helen is around Cutter. The ruby burns bright there, too, but other colours unfurl as well, cobwebby strands of garnet and pale indigo, though they are always strangled out by her other colours, forcibly muffled and constricted away. For as much as she loathes him, a part of her still wants him. Her ruby has scarred the professor as well, leaving another terrible battle wound close to the professor's heart.

Connor is afraid of her.


	4. Indigo

Connor himself is indigo.

A deep, dark blue-purple like a night sky, except without stars. There are some patches of lighter colour, of midnight blue and royal violet, but there are also streaks of black, different from Helen's. This is not crazy oily-black, this is deep, obsidian black, of desolation and loneliness. Sometimes the obsidian is harder to see, sometimes it almost disappears entirely, but there is always a fleck of it here and there. He does his best to ignore them. When he's happy, though, like when the ADD sings perfect harmony to him, or when he _finally_ gets his bloody prototype to work, then swirls of butter yellow and quicksilver white swirl all through his colours, which brighten and turn curly in turn, and he giggles a little because he looks like Van Gogh's _Starry Night_. Connor Temple, the human painting.

He likes his colours. He thinks they're pretty, in a way. Sometimes, if things go particularly well for him, then bright flecks of silver will appear in his colours like someone had flicked mecury on him, and in his indigo and midnight blue and royal violets, the silver looks like stars. Whenever he sees someone that's an ugly orange or murky brown, then he can't help but pride himself a bit on his own colours, on the knowledge that on most days, he looks like a night sky full of stars. Yes, Connor is indigo, but that is not a bad thing. It is a dark colour, but it is not negative.

But sometimes, however, indigo is not such a good colour. When Tom dies, killed by the parasite that turn his colours to a twisted, pained mass of crimson and oil-black and harsh yellow and seething scarlet, then his indigo turns so dark it is hard to tell where one colour ends and another begins, like staring down into a well full of dark waters. He looks in the mirror and sees that the obsidian has returned, shiny dark in his colours. It is many weeks before the obsidian goes away again, before he is no longer the depths of a well and is once more _Starry Night,_ the human painting.

The one bright part of him, though, is on his chest, conspicuously close to his heart. There it is a riot of colours, holding a bit of everyone's colour in him, Stephen and Abby and Cutter and Jenny, even Lester. All their colours lay close to him, and his indigos wrap around them, draw them in close and shelter them. He never sees his indigo in them, though. It doesn't surprise him too much. He's used to that.

Connor still carries their colours.


	5. Maroon

Professor Nick Cutter embodies his colour almost as much as Stephen does his.

Cutter is maroon, a deep, rich purplish-red like aged wine, warm and rich and strong but not too sweet. His colours are infectious too. It is an unconscious charisma he has, this way of drawing people in close to him, maroon reaching out and gently curling around other colours, coaxing them in. He doesn't even realise the gravitational effect he has on others, as he cannot see the maroon that spreads and flows out from him in spirals and curls.

And like the man himself, Cutter's colours are just as wild and unpredictable as him at times. There are times when he will be sitting, calm, his warm maroon laced with calm sapphire and peaceful honey, tinged with relaxed jade, colours rolling in gentle waves, and then he is on his feet, pacing, the sapphire and honey replaced with sparks of brilliant amethyst and vibrant ochre, curling in excited spirals. Connor thinks he can make a study of merely watching the professor's kaleidoscope colours flicker and shift. He also finds the unpredictability of the man's colours familiar and comforting, something steady and strong to lean upon, just as the man himself is.

When the affair is revealed, the span of colour almost makes Connor sick. He sees the hurt, disbelief, anger, betrayal, mistrust, loathing, and sorrow flash across the professor's so quickly, flicking from crimson to neon to scarlet to cobalt to burnt ochre to acid-green to navy in a dizzying phantasmagoria. And now, whenever he looks at Stephen, his maroon is tainted with crimson, the edges growing spiny and sharp, but there is also an edge of turquoise and cranberry, twisted in lonely knots, regret and longing for things to be different. Still, the strong, hard bitter violet of his own stubborn pride refuses to go away, blanketing and muffling the other colours.

God, sometimes Connor wishes he could just grab them both and _shake_ some sense into them. Stephen longs to fix things; they might never be the same, but they could be better. He aches for it, wanting the professor to understand, but he is afraid of the jagged crimson of Cutter's anger, shying away to brew in his own misery and accepting his exile in forlorn resignation. Cutter wants things to change, but his own deep violet pride refuses to bend, hiding his turquoise and cranberry, keeping the bottle green of past friendship from reaching out to the Prussian blue.

Connor will never understand these people.


	6. Emerald

Abby is green, the deepest, brightest, most brilliant green he has ever seen in his life.

She is emerald, and it's so damnably beautiful that it takes his breath away. She is emerald, but without the sharp, faceted hardness of crystal, not like Helen's frozen ruby. Her emerald is rich and deep and soft, like a crushed velvet, something that is almost tangible. Sometimes he finds himself staring at her with something like awed adoration, simply to watch all the shifting, beautiful shades of emerald that flow and ripple around her. He has to try not to, though, lest she think that he's some kind of freak or a pervert, staring after her all the time. She won't understand if he tells her the truth. How could she? _Excuse me for staring, Abs,_ _it's just that you have the most beautiful colours I've seen, the kind of emerald that has no words, and did you know that parts of your colours are near the same colour as Rex?_ Yeah, that one will go over like a tonne of bloody bricks.

Parts of her colours _are_ the same shade of not-envy-green as Rex, though, something that tickles him every time. Still, he takes care not to stare at her too much, settling for watching her colours when she isn't paying a lick of attention to him. Which is...most of the time, actually. So it turns out alright. She is emerald, so lovely and beautiful, and yet, over it all, there is something else, a hard, spiny shell of mahogany brown and burnt orange, a defencive shield wrapped all about herself like protective armour. It keeps other colours from mingling with hers any deeper than the surface level, protects the warm, tender emerald underneath.

It puzzles him at first, until he is around her longer. The colours of people become easier to read the longer he's near them. Like learning the expressions and tones of a close friend, a person's colours will become easier and clearer to him the more time he spends with them. First impressions give him only the base colours, perhaps a few strong emotions. The spiny mahogany-orange shell and the rich emerald underneath are all he sees at first. But the depths of her slowly become visible. Down in the depths of her emerald is a deep crimson scar, surrounded by hues of navy and plum and bitter yellow, and it is from here that her hard spiny shell comes from, the source of her orange and mahogany.

Something or someone has hurt her, badly, leaving that old pain buried down deep inside her. He doesn't know what it is that haunts her still, but it makes him feel terrible streaky to see it. So he tries to earn her trust, her respect and maybe one day, God forbid, even her affection. It might take months, years even, for her to trust him enough to tell him what hurts her, but he is patient. He will do what he must and will wait forever and a day if it means being able to remove the crimson scar he sees in her.

Connor only wishes she'd let him in.


	7. Violet

Lester is the violet man.

He bleeds that rich, vibrant purple of royal violet, so deep it is sometimes tinged in blue like mountain columbines, so bright and dazzling that Connor has a hard time looking directly at it. People think that he's meek, afraid of the suited man. Actually, he's trying to spare himself a headache. It is the colour of confidence and self-assurance, a secure-in-his-own-skin colour, nothing like Connor's own dark African wood violet, uncertain and hesitant. And edging all that bright violet is a sharp, crystalline edge of pale icy blue, an intelligent practicality so ruthless as to rival any bird of prey's. James Lester is not a man to be trifled with.

But that is not all there is to him. Lester is the violet man, but he is also softer than anyone truly realises. Nestled down deep in his colours, over his heart, is a patch that is as much a riot of different colour as Connor's is: pale watermelon, new cornflower, warm cerise, and smoky asteria, all wreathed in the soft, warm garnet of deep-rooted love and affection. These are the base colours of his wife and three children, Connor knows instinctually. Not many people know that Lester has a family, but Connor does. Not because he hacked his personnel file (well, not _only_ ) but because he can see them right there, cradled in the man's colours, sheltered protectively by his violet hues.

And he cares for the team, this violet man, though he pretends that he could not care less. When Cutter has to be pulled out of the claws of some predator, when Abby comes in morose and sad-eyed for a killed creature, when Stephen limps in bloodied and bruised, then worried tawny gold-brown and concerned peridot green blossom in his hues, though they hide behind his ice and violet. When soldiers are killed in the line of duty, sorrowful navy wrinkles appear with sympathetic rose.

Lester will have Connor shot and his body disposed of discreetly should he ever insinuate that the suited man cares anything about the team, but Connor knows better than to say anything. He is comforted by the knowledge that they have their violet man to protect them, always keeping an eye out, his violet spreading out over them all like a protective umbrella. He feels a little safer whenever he sees that flicker of royal columbine blue-violet out the corner of his eye. Lester can act cold and aloof and sienna all he wants to.

Connor knows the truth.


	8. Amber

Not once in his life has Connor seen anyone quite so amber as Claudia Brown.

He would say that her colour is the same as her name, but it isn't quite. There is a difference between brown and amber. Amber is the colour of fossilized tree sap held up to sunlight, darker and richer than honey, yet not as deep as true gold. It is a beautiful colour, one that he so rarely sees, and it is a good colour too, the base colour of someone gentle and kind and warm. Connor tries not to judge people by their base colours, but damned if its not the most effective and accurate judge of character he's ever had.

She _does_ have some brown in her colours, though not the awful murky sort. Hers are flecks of glowing auburn, streaks of polished russet, rippling through the amber like the soft undulations of wood grain. The first time he sees her, his first thought is of the first Jurassic Park film, of the globe of amber with the mosquito inside it, on the end of John Hammond's cane. _That_ is her base colour, and even though he accuses her of government cover-ups and such, he knows that nobody so warmly amber could be that bad. That would be like saying the Easter Bunny is a criminal mastermind plotting world domination.

It isn't just the warmth of her amber that appeals her to Connor, though. It is the affect her amber has on other people. When he first meets Cutter, the shadow of Helen's ruby still haunts him, the frozen ruby wound still raw for him, his maroon dull and pale. Connor feels bad for the man. But when they discover Claudia Brown, her amber is like a shot of adrenaline in his colours. Connor actually does a bit of a double-take, not certain if this is even the same professor. She makes his maroon flare back to life, makes that ruby wound begin to fade, at least a little bit, and when they stand close, their colours twist and twine together in a magenta blush of mutual attraction, throwing off sparks. Connor is grateful for Claudia Brown, for her ability to make the professor as vibrant as he is supposed to be. Her amber _does_ harden sometimes, showing her hidden flashes of scarlet and steel-blue, but then Cutter will give her that hurt, confused look, and her colours go soft once more, reaching out to him.

But then Helen and her frozen fire ruby appears. The Future Predators that make everyone's colours pale with fear attack. The anomaly in the Forest of Dean happens. Cutter comes back through the anomaly with crimson dousing his maroon, asking for a woman none of them know about. Connor is the only person that believes him, but for different reasons than he tells the professor.

Connor can see an echo of amber in Cutter's colours.


	9. Lavender

Jenny is an echo of Lester, not that striking blue-tinged columbine violet, but rather a satiny lavender, like the thin clouds at sunrise, pale and beautiful.

She carries that same hard edge, though hers is steel blue rather than ice. Very similar hues, but still entirely different from each other. She isn't one to be trifled with either, that Connor knows, because he sees how quickly her soft lavender can grow sharp and spiny, steel edges snapping. He isn't afraid of her, but he knows not to tread on her toes, too. He doesn't want to find out how indigo will hold up against lavender.

There's also that edge of wily daisy-yellow in her colours, swirls of sly quicksilver that dance through the lavender. When she spins some clever, ingenious spiel to hapless witnesses, Connor can watch as her quicksilver and daisy slides across the other person's colours, insidiously working their way in, coaxing and soothing, reassuring them that no, they did not see what they think they saw, it was an escaped exotic pet from a private zoo and would they please step this way? He appreciates her more than anything, sometimes, knowing how dangerous their job can be for unsuspecting people.

Cutter can make her turn scarlet faster than anyone else. It's almost a magic trick. Sometimes he doesn't even say anything, merely looks at her, and Connor sees the scarlet flush rising across her lavender. With everyone, anyone else, she is a wellspring of jade patience and relaxed gold, but one sideways look from the professor, and she's flaring up like bloody magnesium. Connor finds it hilarious, especially when she vents on him and then Cutter turns straw-yellow and pale tan in confusion, baffled as to what he did wrong. It is his own private amusement, the Jenny and Cutter show, episodes daily. People sometimes think he's a wee bit mad when he starts giggling over something they can't see.

But Cutter doesn't just make her turn scarlet. Sometimes, her steely edges soften away just as his own spiny crimson ones do, lavender and maroon tentatively interacting with each other, mingling almost shyly. And then Connor can see a flush of pale fuchsia swell up in both of them, hesitant curls of butter yellow and fern green appearing in them. He doesn't say anything about it, it isn't his place and it has always been his unspoken rule that what the colours tell him is a secret between him and the colours. But he notices that a small spot of maroon has taken up residence in Jenny's colour, suspiciously close to her heart and that Cutter bears the same bit of lavender in himself, and it makes him smile.

Connor hopes that the ghost-echo of amber will no longer be in the way.

* * *

 **A/N: now, excluding the prologue, "Seeing the Spectrum", look at the first letter of every chapter.**


End file.
